Favorite Albums of 2009

The usual disclaimers apply. I’ve made no attempt to calibrate what I like against the rest of the culture. This is what I like. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. But if it doesn’t appear on the list, it either means a) I didn’t hear it, or b) I heard it, but didn’t like it better than the 100 or so albums that appear here.

Oh, another thing: ten means ten. Yeah, I listed a bunch of Honorable Mention albums. That means I cheated a bit. But over and over again I’ve seen people pissed off at these kinds of lists, with indignant lists of their own comprised of the 100 or 200 artists who should have appeared in the Top 10. But ten means ten. Really. And I promise that I counted.

Continuing on in the grand tradition of The Replacements and The Hold Steady, Lucero offer 12 ramshackle, raw bar band tales of scruffy losers and outsiders. There’s great Stones-like riffing. There are Memphis horns. There’s a raspy-voiced poet. What’s not to love?&nbsp;1. Joe Henry - Blood From Stars

An album about love - human and divine - delivered by a song-and-dance man fronting a jazz/blues combo. And a profound meditation on the intertwined natures of darkness, grace, and change. Joe Henry is the finest songwriter in contemporary American music. His catechism - thirteen songs in this case, bordered by a prelude and an epilogue - teaches me new things about myself, and love, and marriage, and God, every day.

Bazan breaks up with Jesus, barely hangs on with his family, and writes a wounded song cycle about it, full of anger and confusion. These aren’t merely the most harrowing songs in a career noted for its vulnerability and honesty. They are also the best crafted songs musically, a career high point in the midst of a life low point.

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8. Mount Eerie - Wind’s Poem

Phil Elverum wins the award for combining the most disparate sounds of 2009. Writing songs of epic length, Elverum concocts a mixture of soothing ambience that wouldn’t have been out of place on a David Lynch soundtrack and grating, industrial noise, a sort of black metal lullaby. But good luck sleeping. Beneath the clang Elverum coos disturbing verses about mortality and disintegration. Beautiful and strange.

The best pop album I heard this year. Part Kate Bush pagan priestess, part Amy Winehouse R&B belter, Florence Welch unleashes 13 delectable tracks on her debut, some perfect pop/punk confections (see “Kiss With a Fist”), some so woolly and esoteric as to defy categorization entirely (see “Cosmic Love”). All of them are marvelous; there’s no filler.

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6. Dave Perkins - Pistol City Holiness

Stevie Ray lives, sorta. Dave Perkins has backed everybody - Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, and most of the CCM contingent in Nashville. But he steps out here and rips off a brilliant blues/rock hybrid, spraying guitar notes, howling his literate laments and prayers, and engaging in inspired interplay with a red-hot band. This is the blues with a social conscience and a spiritual bent. And with a sense of humor. “I would hang with the Baptists if they could get that girl for me” is still the funniest line I’ve heard all year.

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5. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society - Infernal Machines

Big band music like you’ve never heard, mixing Ellington arrangements with tape loops and fuzz-toned guitar solos. Argue leaves plenty of room for the soloists, who are incendiary, but the arrangements are still the highlight here. This is big band music the way Duke and Mingus used to play it, but thoroughly immersed in modern sounds and sensibilities.

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4. Aaron Strumpel -- Elephants

In the CCM world, the Psalms have often been used as set pieces for over-the-top emoting and Big Hairdos and Big Smiles for Jesus. Aaron Strumpel strips them back to the basics - tribal percussion, chanting, and occasional wailing, rediscovering the Lament in the Psalms of Lament in the process. Utterly striking and original, Strumpel’s music accentuates the soul in both the music and the words.

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3. Various Artists - Fire In My Bones

This 3-CD set spans sixty years and almost as many stylistic shifts in African-American gospel, offering the best available overview of the music. There's nothing polished to a studio sheen here. These are the unfiltered sounds heard in church services throughout black America, and as such it comes closer to worship music than most of the more sanitized imitators. Raw, raucous, and uplifting, this is music for Sunday morning, Saturday night, and everything in between.

The Dylan/Band comparisons are inevitable, but look - Bob Dylan and The Band made some of the best and most timeless music ever. So Ian Felice sounds like Bob Dylan; specifically, like the mid-‘60s electric Dylan on “Chicken Wire,” and like the early ‘60s folkie Dylan on “Cooperstown.” And The Felice Brothers sound like The Band circa The Basement Tapes. You got a problem with that? I don't.